


the instruments the gods plague us with

by fate-motif (Jo_Girard)



Category: Fantastic Four (2015)
Genre: Depression, Gen, Human Experimentation, Suicide Attempt, Vivisection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 12:55:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5457221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jo_Girard/pseuds/fate-motif
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Reed rebuilds the gate after capture but there is no Victor. There is no real use for Reed anymore. There is only one thing they can do with him.</p><p>Why can't they just kill him?</p>
            </blockquote>





	the instruments the gods plague us with

“So this is what it’s come to.”

The voice of the general could not bring Harvey Allen back to entertaining his guests. His eyes were fixed on what was on the other side of the glass. The spectacle in question was a young man, lying on an operating table, strapped down and surrounded by surgeons. Said subject in question had caused Allen a lot of trouble, and a lot of pain. For some reason, seeing Richards walk out of his quarters with his head hung and accepting of his fate wasn’t enough for Harvey.

“Mr. Allen.” Allen had to turn his body back to the generals that were with the technicians today. He may have looked like an unimpressive sight: a small man in a suit and an ID tag for the base, with a neck brace chafing his neck, facing a line of important military figureheads. But as a bureaucrat, the man knew how to adjust his confidence to whatever public he faced. So he looked up to the ten military men in the room full of technicians, with a confident expression despite the gray rings under his eyes and his dry voice.

“I understand that when we recovered Mr. Richards, you would expect him to be another addition to the line of soldiers you were hoping for,” began Allen. “We’ve had the three other subjects be far more compliant than we expected,” Allen paused to breathe, “and with the return of Richards, we’ve gotten pivotal research effort in the Quantum Gate effort.” Here he smiled at them. “All unpaid.”

“We’ve read the dossiers, Mr. Allen,” interrupted a man in the back, who was almost as short as him but who looked far stockier and cold-eyed. “When we read ‘unfit for military duty’ we expected that his capabilities weren’t able to be used for the field. But as you stand before us, injured by the man in question, you contradict yourself.”

“Despite what little was proposed in the military training plans for Subject One, there was nothing to get him to cooperate.” Allen had to stop a cough building up on his throat. “Even death threats were empty, he knows fully well he is not expendable, in any way.”

“So this was the first alternative you could think up?” replied the first general that had spoken.

“This was decided with much deliberation, weighing the cost of maintaining an unwilling and volatile subject with the greatest effort to - ”

“You’ll run out of tests to do on him eventually,” observed a middle-aged woman in the back.

Harvey Allen knew how to speak in public. It was hard to say anything when his throat was still recovering from the unfortunate assassination attempt, but he knew what had to be said to appease anyone, even inhuman abominations - and for being just the middleman in the operation, he had quite a lot of power. The operation in question was a serious gamble, but it wasn’t senseless.

“The project of the second Quantum Gate is our attempt to reproduce the conditions that created the stars of this show,” he began quietly. “We will learn what we can, and we will involve every specialist possible in the work, but to place all our hopes in one way of getting knowledge is risky. Mr. Richards,” and his tone became more smug, “will contribute in another way to our efforts. Whatever information that can be collected from the procedures we have been doing on Mr. Richards will be immensely valuable...and may be used to create new soldiers, in a potentially less risky alternative to gambling with human lives.”

“First incision.”

The generals and Allen all turned their attention to the vivisection in process, distracted from their argument. They were all wondering of what was to come of it, of course, but Harvey Allen was focusing on the face of the young man. It was blank and cold, like his eyes when he'd been told the date of the vivisection. It was proof that Reed Richards had died before they even made the first incision.

* * *

The vivisection was only the first of three that had been scheduled. The medical testing had begun months before, but the moment the tests had started Reed knew what was at the end of the line. The first two weeks had been the most useful, as he did not resist the testing, cooperated, gave honest answers when asked, and did not resist the same way he had when he’d been faced with the military training plans. “Your health is different from the rest of us and we are only concerned on the best way to approach health plans for the future,” had been the excuse. For some reason, it was like speaking to a brick wall, and the young man did not object to the blatant lies thrown at his face.

The only indication that there was to be trouble was when the technicians began to chastise him for losing valuable hours of sleep. All four of the subjects required at least twelve hours of sleep to function to best effect, but Reed was sleeping at most six hours, and the strain was biasing the lab results. “I’m just used to working longer,” was his response, but despite numerous corrections, his hours of sleep dwindled the more the results were in. Grudgingly, sleeping pills were added to the equation. This was when the trouble began, because Reed would refuse to be drugged. The civil response was that it would affect the results. The technicians brought up that his insomnia was doing it too, but this was not enough to dissuade him. So Harvey was called in for the “diplomacy”.

* * *

“This is all for your health.”

“You know that’s bullshit.” Harvey bowed his head, in a clear _here we go again_ gesture. “I’m done. You all better stop lying to me, and tell me what the point of this is.”

Harvey cleared his throat. “Your response to any and all plans involving military application - ”

“I’m not going to be your soldier.”

“You’ve made that clear.” Harvey’s temper was slowly acting up, between the interruptions, and Richards’ defiance. “Therefore an alternative plan has been put up.”

“So I’m your lab rat now.” Reed’s voice was disgusted. “I’m what you have left if you can’t recreate the accident and get more soldiers.” Harvey did not refute this statement, and it further added to Reed’s anger. “This is going to end with my body in a tank full of formaldehyde to be studied and bags of my blood lined up in a fridge, won’t it.”

“You don’t need to be so crude,” retorted Harvey, unable to play diplomat any longer. “You think we’d be stupid enough to get rid of you that quickly? You’re one in four of your kind - ”

“That’s useless, uncooperative, unreliable, and unmissed.” Reed leaned forward on the metal table where he had spoken to Susan Storm earlier that year.

“You were always so bright.”

Reed’s arms were folded on the table but now he stretched his arm towards the man before him and Harvey was too slow to duck. Reed’s hand struck Harvey in the face and dazed him long enough for Reed to wrap his arm around Harvey’s neck several times, like a boa constrictor’s embrace and squeeze tight. The bureaucrat was helpless in Reed’s grasp, all while Reed increased his strength and hoped for anything that meant Harvey was dead - the sound of a broken neck, his face changing color, or just to drop the man on the floor and see nothing more of him. He didn’t even flinch when the guards stormed the interrogation room and shot him with their tranquilizing darts - too rare to kill off this quickly.

* * *

Allen wasn’t to speak face-to-face with Richards again. The attempt at murder had been by far the greatest slight on his authority, and as long as he remained in his position, he would choose never to face Reed personally again. Despite his small size, Harvey Allen was listened to because he had authority. Reed had humiliated him before everyone else working at the base, and before anyone he was supposed to meet after this. And what was worse was, there was no way Harvey could punish him without his superiors intervening. When Allen was called to make decisions over the bastard, he would glare at the prisoner behind the glass. Even when he was restrained in more and more creative ways, there was always this smug glint in his eye, of _I almost killed you_. It could almost be called hope, except hope couldn’t be this macabre.

After Richards had tried to kill him, he attempted to bargain with the government. They had caught him for his brain, after all, and he could try give them whatever he could think up. He supported this with new research he had done on his own, while on the run. Then he offered inventions, for defense military operations, then offensive. His offers became increasingly desperate, but for all his pleas, whenever a suggestion when to superiors, the answer was always no.

Once Allen had his voice back, he attended one of those meetings where Richards’ offers were discussed. “He doesn’t belong in the battlefield, we have already agreed to that,” was Harvey’s opinion when he was asked to give his advice. “It’s just about making the transition from investigator to investigated.”

The glint of defiance in Reed’s eye was extinguished when the usual no came back with his proposals, as well as with a warning: his suggestions were not going to be heard anymore. No, it wasn’t the message. It was that Harvey himself was instructed to tell Richards this - and he just chose to deliver the message by proxy.

“Tact isn’t my specialty,” was Ben’s only objection.

“Oh, I’m counting on it, Ben.”

* * *

After this, Harvey had won the battle. Reed’s spirit was broken, and he expected to hear no more of the guards wasting valuable darts on the rebellious prisoner. Five days later said prisoner was hooked up to a machine after he tried to starve himself. Nothing would make him speak, eat or even walk. Even electric shocks wouldn’t get him to respond. It was still a plentiful time for the researchers, who now had a completely passive subject to study. They could have done more with him if he actually chose to leave his bed, but what they had was enough. Samples from everywhere in his body, X-rays, electrocardiograms, none of it brought Richards back to life even if pain was involved.

* * *

This came to an end three weeks in.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Not yet.”

“When?”

There was no date set for the vivisection back then.

“I don’t know.”

“Could you try use what you’re doing to help my friends?”

“We don’t choose where this research goes.”

“I didn't choose where mine went, either.”

“Could you work with us, then?”

“...Okay.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Edmund's infamous line from King Lear from Act V, Scene III.
> 
> Edit: Well! I didn't expect people to actually care and hope for updates but they did and now I'm stuck in a rut because I want to pass through Zoology class, next semester, before writing Chapter 2 but I don't know if that is in any way, OK. So...I really don't know if there will be an update very soon. Best case scenario, I get a book from someone, later go through Zoology and find something I was not OK to bullshit, facepalm, edit, and move on. Worst case scenario, my perfectionism won't let me even begin that chapter without something to hold on to and the next update comes after I go through Zoology.
> 
> Either way, I'm sorry if there is no updates for a while. There might be, there might not be.


End file.
